Morning News Roundup (13 Apr)

• Western nuclear analysts said yesterday that Tehran lacked the skills, materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear ambitions, even as a senior Iranian official said Iran would defy international pressure and rapidly expand its ability to enrich uranium for fuel.
  
  The nuclear experts said Iran's claim yesterday that it would mass-produce 54,000 centrifuges echoed boasts that it made years ago. Even so, they noted, the Islamic state still lacked the parts and materials to make droves of the highly complex machines, which can spin uranium into fuel rich enough for use in nuclear reactors or atom bombs. [NYTimes]
  
  
• Knight-Ridder has a boots-on-the-ground report on the Iranian reaction to the country's announcement that it had begun to successfully enrich uranium: Apart from a few schoolyard rallies and celebratory newspaper headlines Wednesday, Iran's first day in the nuclear club was subdued, with workaday Iranians still more preoccupied with pollution and unemployment than possible retaliation from U.S.-led Western powers.
  
  Minutes after the president's speech Tuesday night, one jubilant police officer yelled, "America must respect us now!" then quickly resumed questioning the blood-spattered victim of a traffic accident.
  
  Others were less certain. "I'm still not sure whether this brings us more or less security," said Mehdi Taheri, leaving an upscale restaurant with his wife. "The United States has bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and the Persian Gulf countries. We're surrounded."
  
  
• William Arkin, of the WaPo's Early Warning blog on national security, returns with another revelation on war planning for a possible conflict with Iran:
  

  The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) has been conducting theater campaign analysis for a full scale war with Iran since at least May 2003, responding to Pentagon directions to prepare for potential operations in the "near term." The campaign analysis, called TIRANNT, for "theater Iran near term," posits an Iraq-like maneuver war between U.S. and Iranian ground forces and incorporates lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom.
  [...]
  After new reports of intensified planning for Iran began to circulate over the weekend, the President dismissed the news as "wild speculation."
  
  On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld similarly called media speculation about Iran war planning as "fantasyland."
  [...]
  I beg to differ, Mr. Secretary.
  
  World pressure and American diplomacy would be mightily enhanced if Iran understood that the United States was indeed so serious about it acquiring nuclear weapons it was willing to go to war over it. What is more, the American public needs to know that this is a possibility.

  
  
• 54 percent of the American public do not trust President Bush to “make the right decision about whether we should go to war with Iran,” according to a new LA Times/Bloomberg poll. [via ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• The PlameGate waters get muddied slightly with a new court filing by Scooter Libby yesterday (reported by the WaPo), noting in grand jury testimony two years ago he did not assert that President Bush or Vice President Cheney instructed him to disclose the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters as part of an effort to rebut criticism of the Iraq war.
  

  A court filing last week by the special federal prosecutor investigating the disclosure of Plame's identity had highlighted the fact that Bush and Cheney ordered Libby to disclose details of a previously classified intelligence report as part of an effort to rebut criticism by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV.

  
  But, it seems to me, that this is just a clarification of that previous filing by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Libby testified that he wasn't told specifically to name Plame, but it seems that he was indeed working to defend the administration against Wilson's assertions that it lied to the American public.
  

  Although he pointedly said he was not accusing Libby of involvement in a White House conspiracy against Wilson and Plame, Fitzgerald said the evidence he had accumulated demonstrated that "multiple people" there wanted to repudiate Wilson's criticisms.
  
  In light of the grand jury testimony, Fitzgerald said, "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

  
  
• Gen. John Batiste, the retired commander of key forces in Iraq called yesterday for Donald H. Rumsfeld to step down, joining several other former top military commanders who have harshly criticized the defense secretary's authoritarian style for making the military's job more difficult. "We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And that leadership needs to understand teamwork." [WaPo]
  
  
• In the rush to rebuild, this hurricane-smashed city is dumping its debris into the swamps by the truckload -- and throwing away an opportunity to turn America's costliest natural disaster into the nation's greatest recycling effort, environmentalists say. [AP via ENN]
  
  
• Vast swaths of coral reefs in the Caribbean sea and South Pacific Ocean are dying, while the recently-discovered cold-water corals in northern waters will not survive the century -- all due to climate change. One-third of the coral at official monitoring sites in the area of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have recently perished in what scientists call an "unprecedented" die-off. [IPS]